I apologize to the mods if this should be rolled into the usual litany of Matty complaints. However, I wanted to give it a shot at being seen by Mattel. (And I suspect that's more likely here than at their own farce of a forum or Facebook page).

Today, like everyone else, I witnessed the Digital River crash before noon. Like always. I was faced with the "newly white" refresher page, promising me that I was in a queue and I would soon be allowed access. I can usually find "back doors" into the Matt site via Google, but not today. They all led to the dreaded refresh page. So I waited my turn in line. And waited. For an hour. It's bad enough an e-commerce site in this day and age asks this of its customers, but its worse given that most of us have work to attend to at the same time. That can be difficult to manage.

After an hour, on a whim, I tried to access the "new products" page again from a fresh window. Despite the fact the previous windows were still waiting their turn for access in the queue, this new window LET ME RIGHT IN. That's completely contradictory to what Mattel promises! Of course, at this point, the Tytus I'd hoped to purchase for a friend was completely sold out, but that's a different lesson in BASIC economics. The fact is Matty and Digital River's refresher page is nothing but a placebo meant to hide the fact their site DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY.

I'd have to agree with Casimir. I sat there patiently waiting in queue on the White Screen of Death for 45 minutes to no avail. The minute I manually hit refresh, BAM, I'm instantly in. Of course, as Cas intimated, Tytus was long gone by then. WE LOVE YOU MATTY!!! AND YOUR LIFE PARTNER DIGITAL RIVER TOO!!!

The last couple times I've had IE and Firefox running the automatic refreshes simultaneously. Even though I start them at about the same time, IE completes in about 2 minutes while Firefox takes more like 10 or 15...which I just leave running as a curiosity since I've long since ordered in IE. But, yeah, the refresh function does not work.

Not to mention the idea that you're in some sort of a "queue" always struck me as totally and completely bogus. Ever since they first started the auto-refresh I said the so-called queueing is probably not possible using such a blunt instrument as a browser refresh, and the refreshing is more likely to just give you a random chance to break through with a lucky server request...no different than calling your local radio station to try to win tickets and randomly having your call squeeze through the competing calls. Refreshing a browser, just like calling your radio station faster and, most importantly, more often increases your chances but is by no means a guarantee that you'll get in at all or that someone who tries for the first time after you've tried 100 times won't get it on their first try through sheer luck while you continue to miss. I think that Matty tried to placate the users by telling them the refresh would work just because a refresh every 5 seconds is less strain on the server than people opening multiple browsers and refreshing as fast as they can click. It's true, from a certain point of view, that a slower refresh will help more people get figures faster by ultimately staving off a server crash, but it's clearly not putting people in an orderly line as advertised.

I should emphasize, as I mentioned earlier, this behavior is something I've witnessed since the very first Matty sale. Every month since then, the "refresh" function FAILS. I don't post this simply because of yesterday. I post this because it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME.

I think JediJones' explanation is right on the mark. A "refresh" function has no bearing on a queue. The two concepts are mutually exclusive. It's all seemingly random.

I've been suspicious of the queue from day one. And my impatience helped me realize early on that its bogus. I'm on a mac and I've used both Safari and Firefox. Endless refreshes without entry. Then on a whim I cleared my cache, refreshed manually, and got right in. So definitely don't trust or wait for the Digital River Refresh Queue.